The winds are howling. A canopy of six giant trees is tossing refuse on your roof and creaking like old bones. You know the nearly 200-foot-tall trees are unbalanced and probably rotting at the roots. You know they should be cut down, but, according to the law, you’re not allowed to. What would you do?

“Whenever stuff would fall on the house, I’d get so nervous,” explains Ginny Troyer, a graduate student in literature at U.C.